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A CurtainUp Feature
Timely Quotes
I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers,
and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own
— John Bartlett
Other Quote Archives:
QuotesFrom Past & Present Plays
a href="quotepro.html">Quotes By and About the Theater World's Famous and InfamousShakespeare's
Little Instruction Book
Quotes from Plays
Some people build fences to keep people out. . .and other people build fences to keep people in. Rose wants to hold on to you all. she loves you.
—Bono about the fence that Troy and his son Cory are working on throughout the play even though neither quite understand's why Rose wants it since their modest home "ain't got nothing nobody want." Fences review
I was born on Easter Sunday. The Titanic went down the following Thursday. And why? Two Titanics can't exist in the world at one time! When one shows up, the other has to go down! — the intense, self-confident Harry Hay in The Temperamentals
Death ends a life,but it does not end a relationship.—Gene, the son in I Never Sang For My Father
There are times when you want to spread an alarm, but nothing has happened.—Alfieri, the narrator in The View From the Bridge
Democracy reads well but it doesn't act well — Lord Summerby in< Misalliance smartly revived by the Pearl Theater
What is the point of this stupid, painful life if not to be honest? If not to stand up for what one is in the core of one's being?—Oliver in The Pride
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute— Emily in Our Town
This mornng I was a peaceful country doctor filled with gentle thoughts of a medical description and I coveted nothing, not even my collections. Look at me now. . . if a patient came in with an appendix now I'd miss it so far I'd put his eye out!.— Dr. Haggetty expressing the effect of discovering that the paintings given to him by his deceased former patient and boarder were not as worthless as he had thought, The Late Christopher Bean.
There are people out there who came here. To be helped. To be helped. So someone would help them. To do something. To know something. To get, what do they say? To get on in the world. How can I do that if I don?t, if I fail? But I don?t understand. I don?t understand. I don?t understand what anything means . . .and I walk around. From morning ?til night: with this one thought in my head. I?m stupid.— Carol the failing student trying to communicate her desperation to her self-absorbed, somewhat pompous professor in Oleana
I know I fib a good deal but when things are important I tell the truth.— Blanche — in A Streetcar Named Desire
Love is too fragile a sentiment for out here— Mama Nadi in Ruined
Jewels did not make the queen— Mary after her personal belongings have been taken awayin Mary Stuart
Careless rapture at this stage would be incongruous and embarassing.— Ruth, explaining the more settled aspects of the second marriage of previously married couples like her and Charles in Blithe Spirit
Nothing to be done— Go Go in Waiting for Godot
A pill he is/ But still he is/All mine and I'll keep him until he is/Bewitched, bothered and bewildered like me!—from the signature song in Pal Joey
But why should it all be garbage?
Why? Why should nickels be bigger than dimes? That's the way it is.
— Fox explaining the realities of Hollywood to Karen, his secretary in Speed-the-PlowSpeed-the-Plow
Passion,can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.
— Dysart— dysart in Equus
You've got to be taught to be afraid/Of people whose eyes are oddly made. . . .—--from "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught" — in South Pacific
I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father—Chris, who like his fallen brother Larry, thinks his father should have realized the men fighting World War II were "all his sons."— Chis Keller in All My Sons
. . .Every time you meet hatred, stand up against it and that way, it can never happen again— Irene Gut Opdyke in , a Polish Catholic woman who saved a dozen Jews during the Holocaust, urging a group of students to never again allow such horrors to happen.— in Irena's Vow
You're twenty-five. There's so many other things you could do besides this horseshit. Think about it. You make it to the White House. You do your four years, if you last that long, and then what? You get off the train every morning at Farragut North and trudge to some onsulting firm with all the other political has-beens. Next thing you know you're forty, the fifty, so many races under your belt you can't remember which you won and which you lost. .— Tom Duffy, who's managed enough campaigns for his advice to his young hotshot opposite to resonate.— in Farragut North
I do not understand why I'm having so much trouble taming the Wild. I've done this already. Haven't I already been through all of this? . . .Destroyed Education. Turned our children into criminals. Demolished Art! Invaded Sovereign Nations! What more can we possibly do?
---Hobart Struther— in Kicking A Dead Horse
Love can be had any day! Success is much harder.— Mrs St Maugham in the Donmar Warehouse revival of The Chalk Garden
You're like a pioneer woman without a frontier— Herbie when he meets the indominable Rose in Gypsy
you got somebody in you right from the start, and if you're lucky you figure out who it is and you become it. People who don't become are. . .well, look around you.— Louise Nevelson— in Occupant
My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.
---Samuel Beckett, quoted in review of Endgame at BAM
Life is essentially a very large brillo pad.— T. Ryder Smith in Dead Man's Cell Phone
Alcoholics are mostly disappointed men.—Doc Delaney in Come Back, Little Sheba
Contradictions are what people are, bundles of contradictions, fighting them and working them out. And I refuse to be dictated to by your overly simplistic logic-chopping approach to life—Tom in Grace
It's {television| gonna change everything, it's gonna end ignorance and misunderstanding, it's gonna end illiteracy. It's going to end war.— David Sarnoff,— in The Farnsworth Invention
The only difference between a Jew and a Christian is the superstitions to which they subscribe.— Spinoza. in David Ives' New Jerusalem
Why don't you kill yourself? Why don't you kill yourself? — B
I have thought of it. . . I am not unhappy enough. — A
From Rough For Theatre I— part of Beckett Shorts at NYTheatre Workshop
So imagine your body's a community, and your cells are the people who live there. The dream of every cell is to be immortal. . . to make endless copies of itself, but the community Can only use so many liver cells and no more than two eyes, so your cells need to cooperate. . . .— Dr. William Shumway in The Secret Order
It's remarkable, in fact, that the great majority of great men were also responsible for great carnage in their day. Even men who are only a little out of ordinary must be criminals by their very nature. Otherwise, they never rise above the masses, and they can't stand being part of the masses. .— Raskolnikov in a fascinating 3-actor Crime and Punishment
Dreams are life's coming attractions.— a line from a Feminine Ending, a new play by Sarah Treem
There's so much sheer confusion nowadays,
everybody gets fair shares of praise.
It makes the greatest honors seem quite petty
when they're flung about like cheap confetti.
Anyone at all! The lowest of the low
gets 15 minutes on a TV show.
— Alceste in Tony Harrison's translation of Moliere'sThe Misanthrope
God tells us to work, but . . .you put money into the bank and go to sleep, and the money will what do'you call it, will feed you while you sleep. It's filthy, that's what I call it; it's not right, it's against God— Akim after hearing Mitritch man explain the workings of interest to him.
Against God? Nobody cares about that nowadays—Mitrich
The Power of Darkness
There is a group determined to continue. What's been set in motion can't be stopped. —Agamemmnon in Iphigenia 2.0
Aeschylus and his Greek contemporaries believed that the Gods begrudged human success and would send a curse of hubris on a person at the height of their powers; a loss of sanity tat would eventually bring about their downfall. Nowadways, we give the Gods less credit. We prefer to call it self-destruction— James Reston, in Frost/Nixon
Nothing is simple. 'Simple's' not even simple anymore. Terry, commenting on his kid brother's psychobabbling promise to get his act together in Neil LaBute's world premiering play In a Dark Dark Place
It's such a comfort that all the rich people about here are Conservatives. I believe the same may be noticed in other parts of the country. It almost seems like a special Providence.— Lady Faringford in Lady Faringford, the slim, chic Lady Bracknell-like character in the Mint Theater's 's New York premiere of The Return of the Prodigal
Barry Champlain is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.—Linda, the volatile talk show host's assistant on her experience as his occasional lover in the Broadway revival of Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio.
There are two kinds of people in one's life—people whom one keeps waiting—and the people for whom one waits — Feydak in S. N. Behrman's Biography
History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance. It takes wit and courage to make our way, while our way is making us, with no consolation to count on but art and the summer lighting of personal happiness. . . Our meaning is in how we live in an imperfect world, in our time. We have no other.
— Alexander Herzen inin the conclusion of Tom Stoppard's trilogy Salvage.
Years from now, when you talk about this, and you will, be kind.—Laura, throwing the advice of the Headmistress to the wind in what's very much a case of famous last words in the Keen Company's revival of Tea and Sympathy.
So exactly what kind of style do YOU write in?— The retired ad executive-cum-playwright Henry to the young playwriting student he is interviewing to be his assistant.
Hopefully, if you were to see one of my plays, you wouldn't be able to define it as any one style at all—Len
Of Course! Experimental. Sure, why not, they do very well. Look at Beckett. One lucky break and now he's a genius.—Henry in The Last Word
I don't think the mess that's followed invalidates the original decision.
—Nadia, the American ex-foreign correspondent who believed in the Iraq war initially as a means for helping an oppressed people. in The Vertical Hour.
In real life, I pride myself on being neither good, nor dull. Not that I could tell you what real life consists of. . .when you leave a character's space, you feel more homesick than you do leaving any place real behind. Slow and empty, that's real life. — The Actor who plays Fernan, a building manager, in the play within A Spanish Play by Yasmina Rez (posted 2/01/07)
I am a woman who has no place to go, but I'm going, and after a while I will ask myself why I took my mother's two children to be my own.
Anna Berniers in Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic being given a lovely revival at the Pearl Theatre in the East Village (Posted 1/14/07)
I knew who the surgeon was going to be, so I had fair idea what the operation would look like.
—Oliver, the British doctor explaining why he was against the invasion from the start.
From the debate-like new David Hare play The Vertical Hour.
They say I was born with luck. They didn't say what kind.—Wolf in August Wilson's Two Trains Running.
It's up to us writers to be smart enough to come up with stuff that's going to sell. I don't have the energy to worry about this trend, or what producers are looking for, or what's selling and what's not. There are a lot of people buying tickets to the musical theater. And that's all I need to know.
—Adam Guettel (Floyd Collins, Light in the Piazza), Nelson Pressley Interview, "Born With a Golden Ear" in The Washington Post, 12/16/06 (posted 12/20/06)
Broadway may be a market-place, but the emergence of these two shows [Grey Gardens & Spring Awakening] proves that producers in that sector do not all fall into the category of unimaginative purveyors of what people already think that they want. Some are intent on giving the public what they do not yet know that they want.— Paul Taylor of GB's The Independent, after his whirlwind trip to review recent Broadway openings. (Posted 12/15/06)
Note:Eventually these quotes will migrate into one of our three quote archives: Quotes from Plays. . . Quotes by Theatrical Notables. . . Shakespeare's Little Instruction Book
and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own
— John Bartlett
Other Quote Archives:
QuotesFrom Past & Present Plays
a href="quotepro.html">Quotes By and About the Theater World's Famous and Infamous
Quotes from Plays
—Bono about the fence that Troy and his son Cory are working on throughout the play even though neither quite understand's why Rose wants it since their modest home "ain't got nothing nobody want." Fences review
I was born on Easter Sunday. The Titanic went down the following Thursday. And why? Two Titanics can't exist in the world at one time! When one shows up, the other has to go down! — the intense, self-confident Harry Hay in The Temperamentals
Death ends a life,but it does not end a relationship.—Gene, the son in I Never Sang For My Father
There are times when you want to spread an alarm, but nothing has happened.—Alfieri, the narrator in The View From the Bridge
Democracy reads well but it doesn't act well — Lord Summerby in< Misalliance smartly revived by the Pearl Theater
What is the point of this stupid, painful life if not to be honest? If not to stand up for what one is in the core of one's being?—Oliver in The Pride
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute— Emily in Our Town
This mornng I was a peaceful country doctor filled with gentle thoughts of a medical description and I coveted nothing, not even my collections. Look at me now. . . if a patient came in with an appendix now I'd miss it so far I'd put his eye out!.— Dr. Haggetty expressing the effect of discovering that the paintings given to him by his deceased former patient and boarder were not as worthless as he had thought, The Late Christopher Bean.
There are people out there who came here. To be helped. To be helped. So someone would help them. To do something. To know something. To get, what do they say? To get on in the world. How can I do that if I don?t, if I fail? But I don?t understand. I don?t understand. I don?t understand what anything means . . .and I walk around. From morning ?til night: with this one thought in my head. I?m stupid.— Carol the failing student trying to communicate her desperation to her self-absorbed, somewhat pompous professor in Oleana
I know I fib a good deal but when things are important I tell the truth.— Blanche — in A Streetcar Named Desire
Love is too fragile a sentiment for out here— Mama Nadi in Ruined
Jewels did not make the queen— Mary after her personal belongings have been taken awayin Mary Stuart
Careless rapture at this stage would be incongruous and embarassing.— Ruth, explaining the more settled aspects of the second marriage of previously married couples like her and Charles in Blithe Spirit
Nothing to be done— Go Go in Waiting for Godot
A pill he is/ But still he is/All mine and I'll keep him until he is/Bewitched, bothered and bewildered like me!—from the signature song in Pal Joey
But why should it all be garbage?
Why? Why should nickels be bigger than dimes? That's the way it is.
— Fox explaining the realities of Hollywood to Karen, his secretary in Speed-the-PlowSpeed-the-Plow
Passion,can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.
— Dysart— dysart in Equus
You've got to be taught to be afraid/Of people whose eyes are oddly made. . . .—--from "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught" — in South Pacific
I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father—Chris, who like his fallen brother Larry, thinks his father should have realized the men fighting World War II were "all his sons."— Chis Keller in All My Sons
. . .Every time you meet hatred, stand up against it and that way, it can never happen again— Irene Gut Opdyke in , a Polish Catholic woman who saved a dozen Jews during the Holocaust, urging a group of students to never again allow such horrors to happen.— in Irena's Vow
You're twenty-five. There's so many other things you could do besides this horseshit. Think about it. You make it to the White House. You do your four years, if you last that long, and then what? You get off the train every morning at Farragut North and trudge to some onsulting firm with all the other political has-beens. Next thing you know you're forty, the fifty, so many races under your belt you can't remember which you won and which you lost. .— Tom Duffy, who's managed enough campaigns for his advice to his young hotshot opposite to resonate.— in Farragut North
I do not understand why I'm having so much trouble taming the Wild. I've done this already. Haven't I already been through all of this? . . .Destroyed Education. Turned our children into criminals. Demolished Art! Invaded Sovereign Nations! What more can we possibly do?
---Hobart Struther— in Kicking A Dead Horse
Love can be had any day! Success is much harder.— Mrs St Maugham in the Donmar Warehouse revival of The Chalk Garden
You're like a pioneer woman without a frontier— Herbie when he meets the indominable Rose in Gypsy
you got somebody in you right from the start, and if you're lucky you figure out who it is and you become it. People who don't become are. . .well, look around you.— Louise Nevelson— in Occupant
My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.
---Samuel Beckett, quoted in review of Endgame at BAM
Life is essentially a very large brillo pad.— T. Ryder Smith in Dead Man's Cell Phone
Alcoholics are mostly disappointed men.—Doc Delaney in Come Back, Little Sheba
Contradictions are what people are, bundles of contradictions, fighting them and working them out. And I refuse to be dictated to by your overly simplistic logic-chopping approach to life—Tom in Grace
It's {television| gonna change everything, it's gonna end ignorance and misunderstanding, it's gonna end illiteracy. It's going to end war.— David Sarnoff,— in The Farnsworth Invention
The only difference between a Jew and a Christian is the superstitions to which they subscribe.— Spinoza. in David Ives' New Jerusalem
Why don't you kill yourself? Why don't you kill yourself? — B
I have thought of it. . . I am not unhappy enough. — A
From Rough For Theatre I— part of Beckett Shorts at NYTheatre Workshop
So imagine your body's a community, and your cells are the people who live there. The dream of every cell is to be immortal. . . to make endless copies of itself, but the community Can only use so many liver cells and no more than two eyes, so your cells need to cooperate. . . .— Dr. William Shumway in The Secret Order
It's remarkable, in fact, that the great majority of great men were also responsible for great carnage in their day. Even men who are only a little out of ordinary must be criminals by their very nature. Otherwise, they never rise above the masses, and they can't stand being part of the masses. .— Raskolnikov in a fascinating 3-actor Crime and Punishment
Dreams are life's coming attractions.— a line from a Feminine Ending, a new play by Sarah Treem
There's so much sheer confusion nowadays,
everybody gets fair shares of praise.
It makes the greatest honors seem quite petty
when they're flung about like cheap confetti.
Anyone at all! The lowest of the low
gets 15 minutes on a TV show.
— Alceste in Tony Harrison's translation of Moliere'sThe Misanthrope
God tells us to work, but . . .you put money into the bank and go to sleep, and the money will what do'you call it, will feed you while you sleep. It's filthy, that's what I call it; it's not right, it's against God— Akim after hearing Mitritch man explain the workings of interest to him.
Against God? Nobody cares about that nowadays—Mitrich
The Power of Darkness
There is a group determined to continue. What's been set in motion can't be stopped. —Agamemmnon in Iphigenia 2.0
Aeschylus and his Greek contemporaries believed that the Gods begrudged human success and would send a curse of hubris on a person at the height of their powers; a loss of sanity tat would eventually bring about their downfall. Nowadways, we give the Gods less credit. We prefer to call it self-destruction— James Reston, in Frost/Nixon
Nothing is simple. 'Simple's' not even simple anymore. Terry, commenting on his kid brother's psychobabbling promise to get his act together in Neil LaBute's world premiering play In a Dark Dark Place
It's such a comfort that all the rich people about here are Conservatives. I believe the same may be noticed in other parts of the country. It almost seems like a special Providence.— Lady Faringford in Lady Faringford, the slim, chic Lady Bracknell-like character in the Mint Theater's 's New York premiere of The Return of the Prodigal
Barry Champlain is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.—Linda, the volatile talk show host's assistant on her experience as his occasional lover in the Broadway revival of Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio.
There are two kinds of people in one's life—people whom one keeps waiting—and the people for whom one waits — Feydak in S. N. Behrman's Biography
History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance. It takes wit and courage to make our way, while our way is making us, with no consolation to count on but art and the summer lighting of personal happiness. . . Our meaning is in how we live in an imperfect world, in our time. We have no other.
— Alexander Herzen inin the conclusion of Tom Stoppard's trilogy Salvage.
Years from now, when you talk about this, and you will, be kind.—Laura, throwing the advice of the Headmistress to the wind in what's very much a case of famous last words in the Keen Company's revival of Tea and Sympathy.
So exactly what kind of style do YOU write in?— The retired ad executive-cum-playwright Henry to the young playwriting student he is interviewing to be his assistant.
Hopefully, if you were to see one of my plays, you wouldn't be able to define it as any one style at all—Len
Of Course! Experimental. Sure, why not, they do very well. Look at Beckett. One lucky break and now he's a genius.—Henry in The Last Word
I don't think the mess that's followed invalidates the original decision.
—Nadia, the American ex-foreign correspondent who believed in the Iraq war initially as a means for helping an oppressed people. in The Vertical Hour.
In real life, I pride myself on being neither good, nor dull. Not that I could tell you what real life consists of. . .when you leave a character's space, you feel more homesick than you do leaving any place real behind. Slow and empty, that's real life. — The Actor who plays Fernan, a building manager, in the play within A Spanish Play by Yasmina Rez (posted 2/01/07)
I am a woman who has no place to go, but I'm going, and after a while I will ask myself why I took my mother's two children to be my own.
Anna Berniers in Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic being given a lovely revival at the Pearl Theatre in the East Village (Posted 1/14/07)
I knew who the surgeon was going to be, so I had fair idea what the operation would look like.
—Oliver, the British doctor explaining why he was against the invasion from the start.
From the debate-like new David Hare play The Vertical Hour.
They say I was born with luck. They didn't say what kind.—Wolf in August Wilson's Two Trains Running.
It's up to us writers to be smart enough to come up with stuff that's going to sell. I don't have the energy to worry about this trend, or what producers are looking for, or what's selling and what's not. There are a lot of people buying tickets to the musical theater. And that's all I need to know.
—Adam Guettel (Floyd Collins, Light in the Piazza), Nelson Pressley Interview, "Born With a Golden Ear" in The Washington Post, 12/16/06 (posted 12/20/06)
Broadway may be a market-place, but the emergence of these two shows [Grey Gardens & Spring Awakening] proves that producers in that sector do not all fall into the category of unimaginative purveyors of what people already think that they want. Some are intent on giving the public what they do not yet know that they want.— Paul Taylor of GB's The Independent, after his whirlwind trip to review recent Broadway openings. (Posted 12/15/06)
Note:Eventually these quotes will migrate into one of our three quote archives: Quotes from Plays. . . Quotes by Theatrical Notables. . . Shakespeare's Little Instruction Book
